> What I always wonder is - why so many different types of UFO ?
> Is the Earth an inter-stellar truck-stop - "More Arcturian waffles
> hon ?". The equivalent of Hitchhiker's Guide Barnard's Star **,
> where you can cadge a ride to anywhere ?

They're just teasers- you know, bored rich kids that land next to
some unsuspecting sod and strut around with antennas on their
heads making "beep beep" noises.  Very juvenile, really.

> My personal opinion is that the US and Soviet governments are/were
> quite happy for citizens to believe in UFOs. It encouraged them to track
> them. Because the UFOs were in fact their and the opposition's test
> and experimental planes. May not cover them all but it's a start

My personal experience has been that, especially when the observer
is in a car and it's dark out, fast moving objects in the sky can
appear to do remarkable things (acute angle turns, sudden stops and
reversals of direction, hovering, moving silently) quite easily, especially
when they are fast moving but entirely conventional jet aircraft.

My own experience with UFOs occured at a Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson
concert a couple of years ago.  I notice a patch of sky nearby where
small, very luminous craft were traveling at immense speeds, making
right angle turns, then vanishing and reappearing, all in complete
silence.  I have a tremendous phobia (really) of LGM and such, so for
about 10 seconds I was pretty scared- but then the scientist won and
I began a careful observation and contemplation.

It turns out my sense of scale and distance was off by at least two
orders of magnitude, and the bright, incredibly fast objects zipping
around the sky were in fact birds passing in and out of upward
pointing lights about three streets away.  The rapid changes in
direction were due to them flying in circular paths- as they were flying
in one direction "across" my field of view, the slowed down, and when
their arc completed and they were flying roughly away from me, they
were "hovering", and as they turned away, they "sped up" rapidly.

I guess the lesson here is that when you see something out of your
sphere of personal experience, you assign it the easiest (if not most
logical) explanation.  Many people stop there- OMG I just saw a
UFO!!!1!!!  Others dig deeper.

It reminds me of a story about a woman driving through the redwood
trees in California- she called the park ranger in a panic over "all
the Irish Setters dead on the side of the road".  In fact, they were
huge peel chunks of redwood bark, but she A) didn't know that, B)
applied her closest model and C) didn't bother with even a rudimentary
"sniff test" about whether it makes sense or not.  She probably sees
UFOs all the time, too.

If you made it this far, congratulations.

Mike H.
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